Facebook is not without its “fake news” articles having been posted, but there comes to mind the question or not the legitimacy of an article posted to Facebook. Some readers may look at the source and disregard it all together as some biased blog post instead of one of the mainstream media outlets. Now it appears that Facebook is leaving it up to the general public to flag questionable articles and then this enables third party fact checking sites to give clarification on the piece’s legitimacy.

This new system of Facebook’s enables the ability to dispute singular articles and not the entire site containing that article, according to Gizmodo. There’s a graphic on their site that shows an example such as, “Disputed by Snopes and Politifact.” The push here with these chosen, disputing sites is to create a non-partisan third party “to assess the factual accuracy of stories reported as fake by users.”

This may be due in part back during the 2016 election, where there was an influx of “fake news” or questionable news popping up everywhere on the social media site. Of course, with a platform where anyone who is anyone can have access to it, it would make sense that if it’s posted, they are hoping for clicks.

Going back to the designated fact checkers, to prove their legitimacy as well, they need to sign a Code of Principles delivered by Poynter. That said, this site merits a pretty decent standard in which to follow.

Don’t forget, there’s also a slew of non-political hoaxes out there polluting the Facebook news feed stream. For example, there was a recent Chuck Norris piece going around that said he had died at the age of 71. Of course, this isn’t true and this particular event added insult to injury for those who clicked on the link and had redirected Facebook users to a site that hacked into their login credentials and thus resulted in that user’s account being compromised and then the re-posting of said Chuck Norris hoax to their news feed.

There’s also the unproven hoax regarding a human sex trafficking trick regarding tucking a shirt over on a windshield wiper. The list can go on, but those are the most recent.

Dislike Your Facebook Messages

Social media users for a long time had been pressing for a dislike button. However, this only concerns the messenger app. It has been rolled out along the lengthy menu of emoticons already available. RT reported this to be just a trial for just around half the amount of Facebook users of the app. Could this test figure out the frequency in which it’ll be used to decide to take it to the news feed?

There is also the latest in regards to Facebook’s “Reactions,” and the feature itself has become quite popular with users as over 300 billion reactions have been submitted. The difference between “Reactions” and the messenger app’s version is the two differ in that one is just a “thumbs down” while the latter is an actual “dislike.” Tech Crunch was cited as saying the following.

“We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more fun and engaging. This is a small test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.”

There seems to be a psychology to all this when utilizing emoticons in such a fashion. Apparently, this is seen by Facebook as a “no” button as opposed to “dislike”. This may seem like semantics, but according to the social media company, they see an apparent logistics when it comes to emoticons while in chat.